this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2023
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Fun fact: programs for gifted kids have historically been far more underfunded than programs for other exceptional students.
By the way, the euphemism of "exceptional children" pleases my autistic brain way more than any other word for Special Education students. It has all the compliment-sounding qualities of "Special Needs" but is even more literal than any previous euphemism. It literally means "kids that teachers need to make exceptions for"
"Gifted" programs royally screwed my education. I had huge gaps in my knowledge because they decided that being top percentile in reading/writing (and being the weird kid) meant I could just skip out on classes for special little weird classes or sit with higher grade classes. I just had ADHD btw and really liked to read. Anyway, I would LOVE to know wtf they thought they were doing moving a kid around that much in 3rd-5th. I suffered the hardest with math. I was missing bits and pieces, which is pretty gd important in math, and I'd still somehow get the answers right but talked to about my overly complicated or ✨creative✨ solutions lol. Even now I hide my work if I need to solve something because I'm probably doing it weird... Then later it was really fun finding out that I couldn't really live up to being "gifted". 0/10 being special made me less educated.
Skipping classes as a "gifted" kid always seemed like a very weird concept to me, you're making the child lose a lot of interaction with their peers for dubious reasons. It seems to me like it should only be reserved for the most bulging hyperwrinkled brains, like those kids that finish college by the time they're 16 or whatever that would obviously be extremely understimulated when going the normal pace. Even then you could argue the gigabrain kid would probably benefit greatly from socializing with their peers, I mean where's the rush really? They're young, they can always learn more later.
those kids that finish college by 16 usually just have parents that pay a fuckton of money to skip their kids through the honestly very simple and bleak public schooling experience. has nothing to do with intelligence and everything to do with not dragging out units for ages and paying a small fortune to get private tutors and certified testing done.
For what it's worth, math can be taught very linearly, but I think it can be explored and approached many different ways. I did the same thing, the teachers would say "I don't know how, but you got the right answer".
I kind of wish we leaned more into the way individual kids intuitions of math worked, I think you could teach the foundations much faster that way.
3-5 is mostly arithmetic and intro to word problems anyway, I'm awful at arithmetic but it doesn't affect doing any of the important parts of math.
"well if those kids are so smart surely they can do more with less right?"
-average conversation at an budgetary meeting for education, probably
Truth. When I was in the gifted reading program us dweebs had to temporarily be relocated to the teachers break room.
I'm sure the teachers that shared that break time with us didn't enjoy it.